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Some Cool Things I Did This Year – Diving in Marseille

Sam — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:04:49 +0000

While I didn’t do much diving this year, I did do more than last year (not hard I know). And the best diving was the trip down to Marseille. We spent four days in Marseille on an island (Isle de Frioul), which is next to Isle d’If where the Man In The Iron Mask was imprisoned. Having been told that there were no fish in the Med, we were surprised to find quite a few of them hiding in various places. The diving was a nice mix of nature diving and cool wrecks, which included a Messerschmidt 109E, shot down in WWII.

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Oh and some pretty spectacular little caverns, just the right things to be pootling about in for a while. Read more on the club blog

Deep Down in Marseille

Sam — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:49:20 +0000

I’ve been off in France. Not diving, as here, which was taken in September, but in Brittany.
It was great.

Diving at Easter

Sam — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:22:20 +0000

Sunset in Weymouth

Just been down to Weymouth for the first diving of the year. As usual Easter is pretty packed even though everyone said the weather would be super shite – not just your normal shite for April but really rather spectacularly shite. Turns out everyone was wrong, wrong, wrong. Weymouth was super sunny for the whole four days.

And because it hadn’t been too warm there was no massive plankton bloom to get in the way of seeing stuff underwater. So our first dive on the Countess of Erne had some of the best viz I’ve seen on it. Given I haven’t been diving for about 18 months and had a bunch of new kit I was preparing to be quite the fuckwit underwater, but turns out I hadn’t forgotten everything and there was just a lot of messing about to be done configuring the kit to feel exactly right. All the stuff I’d bought at the Dive Show worked fine, although anyone who can go diving in the UK in just a Fourth Element Xerotherm undersuit and a membrane drysuit has to be pretty hardcore as it took me hours before I felt even vaguely un-hypothermic. The water may have been 9 degrees but it felt like I’d been dipped into an ice bath and left there for hours. Mental note: next time go for the full on Arctic undersuit. Admittedly the Xerotherm does look very fashionable and stylish, but there are limits. Strangely enough my feet (encased in top quality £10 football socks) and my hands (3mm neoprene gloves) felt so much warmer than my core.

One thing that has to be said about UK diving is that it is a million times better when the sun is shining and we were treated to some class sunsets. Sweet.